How to Escape the Oil Trap Fareed Zakaria NEWSWEEK If I could change one thing about American foreign policy, what would it be?
The answer is easy, but it’s not something most of us think of as foreign policy. I would adopt a serious national program geared toward energy efficiency and independence. Reducing our dependence on oil would be the single greatest multiplier of American power in the world. I leave it to economists to sort out what expensive oil does to America’s growth and inflation prospects. What is less often noticed is how crippling this situation is for American foreign policy. “Everything we’re trying to do in the world is made much more difficult in the current environment of rising oil prices,” says Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Ideas That Conquered the World.” Consider: Terror. Over the last three decades, Islamic extremism and violence have been funded from two countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran, not coincidentally the world’s first and second largest oil exporters. Both countries are now awash in money and, no matter what the controls, some of this cash is surely getting to unsavory gro
